


Names

by 222Ravens



Category: Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Genre: Autistic Dairine, Canon Autistic Character, Friendship, Gen, Introspection?, background references to Tom/Carl, discussion of Roshaun & Dairine, self-diagnosis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-03
Updated: 2015-07-03
Packaged: 2018-04-07 13:01:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4264158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/222Ravens/pseuds/222Ravens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Darryl & Dairine do a spell, & Dairine... Learns a few things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Names

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Geekhyena](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Geekhyena/gifts).



> For the prompt:  
> ""Just because girls get diagnosed with autism at a lower rate than boys, doesn't mean autistic girls don't exist. Please give me autistic!Dairine please please please. I feel that she definitely could count as autistic and I've headcanoned her as such. It makes sense to me. Give me her and Darryl being autistic badass wizards together? I feel they'd work well together ^_^
> 
> ALTERNATE PROMPT: if you really feel uncomfortable writing Dairine as autistic, can you at least give me and her Darryl bonding/geeking out together? Maybe he meets the Mobiles? Maybe they attend a star wars convention together? I like the idea of them being buddies""
> 
>  
> 
> _________
> 
> This is drawn a lot from personal experience, and in fact it got a bit more personal sometimes than I expected, but I think I like the way it turned out. I hope it fits the prompt okay, because it diverges from the exact prompt a little, but this is where my writing bug took things.
> 
> Caveat that self diagnosis isn't a process that is for everyone, but it's something that I think there is a lot of validity to, and it fits well with certain concepts that get played around with in the series about defining things & naming them, so I wanted to explore a bit of that, in this idiom.

Darryl called on a Sunday morning, and Nita had been out, so Dairine had gotten herself volunteered. 

It wasn’t a hard spell, exactly, but while some spells needed firepower, others just needed the kind of concentration and words that were tricky to manage with a single person.

“So bilocate.” She’d suggested, letting her legs swing off the sides of the kitchen counter.

“Can’t. I mean. I’d consider the stretch, but I have to go clothes shopping too, today.”

Dairine made a face that Darryl couldn’t see through the phone, then a noise that communicated essentially the same sentiment. “Yuck.”

“Tell me about it. Malls.” Darryl said, like it was somehow a swear-word, voice crackling down the receiver.

Dairine had a hunch she knew what he meant. The last time she’d been to a mall… Well, those had been unusual circumstances, to be sure, but the point stood. Besides, there was a reason her wardrobe was fairly utilitarian, mostly involving…

“and then I’m just gonna have to cut all the tags off again, seriously, who invented those things…” Darryl was continuing.

She laughed at that, just a little, adjusting her own t-shirt collar. “That One, probably.”

“You too?” Darryl said, almost delighted by it, and there was something infectious about his excitement.

“They itch. Nita always said I was ridiculous for noticing.”

ju

“Wrong. Ugh. So wrong. So. Anyway. The spell. Can you assist?” 

Dairine paused, muffling the urge to groan, because she’d had plans for the day.

Alright, so the plans had been pretty similar to what she’d done for the last bit of summer vacation. Wellakh, more lessons, get so caught up in the haze of wrestling with starfire she would probably forget to come home for dinner, straggle in late, deal with that, fall into bed, rinse and repeat, with a few off days for other assignments, random personal projects, and looking for someone when she still hadn’t fully figured out how to look, much less where. 

Besides, she’d never quite got what Nita had waxed quite so rhapsodic about in terms of group-wizardry and connecting. With the mobiles, certainly, but that was an entirely different ball-game. Other wizards of her species, though? It worked, and she’d done it, but sometimes some of them had felt like too much, too much in her head at once in ways that conflicted, or it turned out messier than she wanted because she had the way to do things all sorted, and then someone else had come in and messed it all up… 

Dairine knew that was petty, that there was nothing unreal about any kind of wizardry, that it all built on itself, every bit counting towards preserving life, and all of the things she’d pledged. Things that were still important to her, even distracted. Even tired.

But it could be interesting. Sometimes it was entirely worth it. At any rate, at the end of the day, errantry was errantry. 

So they’d met in her backyard. If any neighbours peeked through the fence, the usual wizardries that dealt with that sort of thing were in place. But at any rate, the two of them looked “normal” enough, being near enough the same age and such.

“Dai!” Darryl had said, bouncing on his heels just a little He looked up at her, his smile slightly unfocused but beaming with goodwill. Spot’s disc-drives whirred as Darryl bent down to greet him. 

Dairine’s return smile echoed the effects of Darryl’s unfiltered presence. She didn’t know Darryl very well, and she was never sure how she felt about being too over-friendly without it being earned, most of the time.

It was easier when she made an effort, but she was tired, and this was mostly about business, wasn’t it? Her lack of effusiveness didn’t reflect any particular. It wasn’t about being rude, it was just easy to be cooler until the groundwork was laid. Darryl was another practitioner, of course, and they had some things in common, probably. But, well… ‘Friends’ was probably pushing it.

Probably.

Was he a friend?

Truth be told, Dairine wasn’t always good at sussing that sort of thing out. Sure, she had plenty of acquaintances, even people she hung out with, that sort of thing. But friend-friends always felt like a more nebulous sort of thing.

Dairine wasn’t good with friends, barring perhaps once. There’d been reasons, of course, always reasons. The fact that her parents never let her skip a grade, “for social reasons” was probably a large one, having had precisely the opposite of the intended effect, because she was forever waiting around for the rest of them to catch up.

She kept hoping they would. It didn't seem fair, that she could work out so many things but not this.

It wasn't that people bullied her, exactly, not the way they did Nita, because she’d put an end to that, pretty quick. 

And she could be a leader, by dominating the conversation, by pushing her ideas and not listening, because why not, hers were better, to the point where teachers would comment on it, tell her parents what an example she was, even if it rarely felt like it meant anything.

But neither of those things precisely translated into friends, in the traditional sense of the word. 

Some days were easier. Other days were harder, days when she was tired or stressed and everything *grated*, the whole world felt sharp and she got angry about it, decided it would hurt less if she cared less. If she built armour, maybe.

Other days, in honesty, she’d spent a lot of time trying, and messing it up, or not trying at all, letting things slide on that front, because there was always other things to do, and why bother trying to built tenuous connections when there was another book to read, something else on the computer to fiddle with, something new to learn. Her parents had worried, especially her mother… And there went the usual flare of pain, thinking of that, but she was always quick to reassure, quick to say she was fine, thanks, not to worry at all, there. 

Sure, she’d spent a long time without anyone like Kit was to Nita, but then, so had Nita, for longer than Dairine was old, and Nita had turned out alright.

And so she was. She still was. 

This was a dangerous line of thought, and one that frightened her a little, perhaps, because she wasn’t sure what she’d do with another friend, if she had one. Or worse, thought the same part of her brain that had spoken up a moment ago, thinking of her Mom. The part where thoughts of entropy were running, that thought, worse, if she lost one again.

But, still. Darryl was nice. She’d been… Distracted, when Nita and Kit had first encountered him, still stuck in headspace that felt like static and nothingness, like an empty pit that meant that very little registered to her, so she hadn’t paid as much attention to that particular situation as she might have under on a normal circumstances. 

Not that her life was ever normal.

And then she’d other things to think about, for a while, like trying to move past that, getting better, then the exchange, and the Pullulus, and everything after that. She’d never really taken a lot of time to talk to Darryl, really.

The spell itself was a good one, with some clever details to it, dealing with ways to gently discourage birds from venturing to close to the airport, the JFK one that was so close to Jamaica Bay and the wildlife preserve, there. A simple twisting that would make any birds tempted to venture into danger zones decide against it, far more effectively than any of the usual methods the airports tried. Less lethally, too, which was the salient detail. 

It was, in principle at least, much in the same way of any of the spells they used regularly to keep non-wizards from stumbling upon you during the middle of a working, but it was something that would be set up over a much larger area, with a lot more variables. The actual implementation would be later, and on location, so to speak, but building the framework of the spell could be done well enough anywhere, really. 

Maybe it was an oversight, especially as, setting up the spell parameters, she’d found they shared a fairly similar taste in certain things, like some of the recent Star Wars comics. There was some delight in that, in finding that common ground and discussing something, quite delightedly and quite at length, and and finding that the other person was just as unwilling to shut up about it as you were. Darryl was extraordinarily expressive when he talked, moving his hands every which way, and Dairine almost envied him that, in a funny sort of way. 

The conversation was a decent enough distraction, for they were doing what felt to her like a fairly basic spellwork, albeit labour intensive and fiddly. Enough that Dairine was almost bored by the mechanics of it, half-way itching to run through the whole thing and be done with it. 

Dairine spent a quick minute looking over Darryl’s name, pretending to not-notice a couple points where things were a little different than what was exactly standard, (she knew the price of mentioning it) and then noticing another one, that, while non-standard, was probably for a different reason.

“Is that?” She started, tracing the curves of the symbol, glowing and hanging in mid-air, with the kind of solid realness that things in the Speech always shone with, faintly. She moved along it with her finger, looking it over, then stopped. Was it rude to ask? Half the time, admittedly, whenever she asked something and people and somehow called it rude, she couldn’t figure out what had made it [her behavior]rude to begin with, anyway. People called her caustic, sometimes, but it didn’t always come out that way on purpose. 

“Being autistic? Yep.” Darryl said, his customary grin just as bright. “Did you not know?

Dairine looked, curious. “I thought it’d be a smaller part, somehow. Of your name.”

She knew Darryl was autistic, of course, even if the exact stipulations of that were a bit fuzzier to her. And wasn’t that funny. She knew a great deal, about a great deal of things, but there were always gaps in anyone’s wheelhouse, places where things slipped past understanding. She’d read books on just about everything, but she still managed to have a somewhat vaguer picture of autism. Beyond a bit that Nita had mentioned, some stuff Darryl had said previously, a book or two with characters in them that had always struck her as written in a faintly impersonal way, without the kind of realness that made a character leap off the page for her. Always in ways that had struck her as something that was more the fault of the author, than anything about the character.

“Huh. You know, I never asked, but part of me kind of wondered if you…” Darryl shook his head. “But seriously, Why? It’s not something that’s small. It is. I am. “ Darryl shrugged. “It’s… Important. I’m not sure how else to put it, I guess.” 

“What’s it like?” Dairine said, and Darryl groaned.

“I hate that question, and it’s my job to describe ways of being, most days. I don’t know. It just is. I can’t separate it out from the way I look at things, so I don’t know any way to know what it’s like not to be. But it’s… Things hurt more than they tell you they should, sometimes. Or exhaust you more. Or don’t make sense, when everyone tells you it’s supposed to make sense, especially the way other people act. Or how you can just get so burnt-out sometimes, to the point where you can’t do anything, where it all feels like a big jumbled mess and nothing matters, and just dealing is hard, really hard. Especially if there’s other stuff going on. Or you have to just focus on one thing, and let everything else slide, because you can’t juggle the rest of it.”

Dairine had a twinge at that, because if there was one thing she understood, lately, it was that. Getting caught up in things, letting other things slide, feeling like coping was a big mess and not wanting to admit it to herself, let alone anyone else. 

“There’s a lot of good, too. The way everything can narrow in, when something is interesting, like when you’re about to start a spell. The way you fall in love with stuff, need to know everything about it, the way things being important are the most important thing in the world, the way you look at things and think that other people don’t see thing the way you do, but not in a bad way, just a different way… The way you look at things.” He shrugs again. “It’s… A lot of stuff, I guess.”

Dairine frowned, realizing that none of what Darryl had said about being autistic wasn’t any help at all in figuring out what made him different. Or at least, not different in the sort of way that autism was meant to be, wasn’t it? 

It all sounded perfectly normal, or normal enough to her. She wasn’t as sure about other people. She’d never been quite as good at figuring out the ways other people were thinking, not most of the time. 

“Huh.” Darryl said, looking at Dairine’s name. “Your bit in that section is different, I think, I’m not sure I’ve seen that phrasing, before.”

She glanced over, where the ropey knot of spellwork was balanced in his hands. It had the same solidity as Darryl’s name, and the same sense of being She could never quite get used to that, looking at everything that was her. 

Dairine shook herself out of the train of thought she’d been in, and stopped dead, for when had that happened to it, a bit of symbol, there, in all the bits about how her mind worked, something she’d never really noticed before. 

It wasn’t entirely a surprise to her, in some respects. There’d been a lot of weird in her head, lately. But, no, that didn’t seem to be what that was describing There were other places for that kinda information to connect to, stuff she could suss out by looking at it. 

Except, it wasn’t really a matter of when that had happened, like it was something done to her name. Because, come to think of it, she thought that bit of information had been there before, maybe even from the very beginning, somehow, just not in a way that had been immediately apparent to her. 

“Spot, what’s that?”

“Determinable. Undefined.” Was all that Spot said, and Darryl drummed on his leg, scrunching his brow.

‘What’s determinable?”

“Undefined. Determinable. The symbol. The expression of.”

“Determinable by who?” Dairine asked, suddenly needing answers, and twisting the corner of her shirt in her hand, idly nervous. 

“Unspecified.” Was the only reply, because Spot was apparently in one of those moods again. She supposed she ought to be thankful it hadn’t come out poetry, this time. 

“I think I’ve had enough lately of indeterminates.” Dairine said, scowling fiercely.

Darryl shrugged. “Does anyone like them?”

Dairine scuffed at the grass. “Probably not. But still. Why do you think I took the Oath? Isn’t wizardry is supposed to have answers, not just make everything more confusing?”

“The day that happens, you let me know. Still. It might not be that weird. Maybe it’s just something you haven’t figured out, yet. It was a bit like that when I did my Ordeal. I didn’t know I’d finished it, so it didn’t show up as done. Sometimes things are hard to process, hard to get the right words for. That’s happened sometimes, for me, especially when I get days when I’m a little overloaded, and getting the finer details can be hard when things are feeling fuzzy around the edge. There’s allowance for that in the Speech, I think.” Darryl suggested, trying to lean against one of the trees in the backyard, then making a face and squatting, instead. 

“Maybe.” Dairine said, discomfited, but let it slide for the moment. “Let’s just get this done with.” 

“Can I nab some of your lemonade when we’re done?” Darryl asked, apparently nonplussed. 

So they’d finished the work that was needed for the day, and after a tart lemonade and a bit of conversation, they’d parted ways, and Dairine had been left mostly to her own devices for the afternoon.

Any task she tried kept getting caught up in false starts, for she’d kept thinking about it, though, about the funny uncertainty in her name, and what Darryl had said about being autistic. None of it made sense, but that was never something that stopped her, exactly, more something that usually just wound up pushing her.

 

It wasn't precisely as though she could be considered normal on the best of days, not with the mobiles and everything related there. Nor, given what she'd learned of Wellakhit, was Earth necessarily the best fit for her.

Yet looking back, these nagging sorts of things were there long before the manual ever showed up, before she'd welded thought to motherboard. They were there in ways that went beyond anything wizardly, or anything else, and… Huh. 

She’d pulled up Spot, though, and done a bit of idle googling, and searching in the manual, to boot, looking at a certain subject matter in a way she’d never thought to, before.

Somehow, without really thinking it through, she’d dialled up Tom and Carl’s house on Spot, still sitting in the backyard under the shade of the trees, because it was quieter out there, and her brain felt full of questions and empty of anything concrete to go on.

Beyond a funny sort of hunch, and if she’d learned one thing from wizardry, it was to follow one of those. 

She’d debated whether or not to go over, but while both face-to-face and phone calls could be intimidating in all different kinds of ways, Spot was already there, and it had felt easier.

“What does it mean to have part of your name in the Speech be… Determinate?” Dairine had said, once the formalities of greeting were over with.

“Is this more on Roshaun?” Carl asked, a faintly rustling noise in the background, probably from Annie or Monty. 

“No. Me.”

There was silence at the other end of the line, then a breath. “Well, at your age, it’s hardly uncommon. At any age, really. Identifiers are fluider things than we give them credit for, even as wizards. There’s a lot about any person that they don’t know well themselves. Any name in the Speech is bound to require some leeway, from that perspective, because if you nail things down too narrowly, well. That’s a whole different can of worms. But sense of self… It’s a tricky one. Sometimes there are parts of yourself you haven’t figured out yet, areas where the full dataset isn’t necessarily present, and there’s a certain principle in Wizardry about giving answers a person isn’t ready for, yet.”

“So there’s something I don’t know? About my own mind? How can there be something that feels this big and I’ve never noticed? Or nobody else has noticed? I’ve talked to shrinks, that’s hardly an issue.”

“Not necessarily something you don’t know. Maybe something you need to confirm, possibly. You could be exactly the way you think you are, but another part of you isn’t sure. Or vice versa. But yes, it could be that. Don’t feel badly about it. There are things about myself that took me a lot of years and Tom’s showing up for me to work out.” He chuckled, rueful. “Felt a bit dense, then, for never noticing… But that’s life, sometimes. And Life. Did something particular bring on this train of thought?“

“I was doing a wizardry with Darryl, and…”

“Oh, the birds thing? It’s a good idea, and glad to see you taking some breaks, even if it’s still business.” The rustling noise was a little louder, and some footsteps, like Carl was walking into another room as he talked.

“So… I should look into it?” Dairine looked up at the sky, staring hard at nothing and squinting a bit.

“Do you have a direction to look?”

Dairine paused. “Maybe?” She said, and was startled to find that it was true. That felt almost like a relief, somehow, even if she was conflicted about it. That there was a place to be looking at, this time, something she could figure out, even if a lot else in her life was less cooperative in that direction. 

So she’d done the thing that she always did when she needed answers about something.  
She read. 

Most of the afternoon was taken up by a trip to the library, because while there was more information online, certainly, there was a kind of comfort in the solid knowledge of a book that offered stability she’d needed at that moment.

Hours passed and a pile of books at grown in front of her, sitting in a corner of the library where she wasn’t going to be disturbed. She’d taken a break, gone home for dinner and eaten mechanically, too caught up in thinking about it all. Nita and her Dad hadn’t even noticed, and she felt a bit guilty about that. Had she really been disconnecting that much, lately?

It had been hard to go to bed, that night, but she’d managed it, somehow, falling asleep with almost a sense of expectation, a sense things were rearranging.

The next morning, she was due for a session with Roshaun’s father, but blew it off in favour of going back to the library. This was wholly unlike her. School, she’d blown off plenty, sure, but not this. Yet this was important, her head was roiling with ‘well maybes’ and ‘what ifs?’ and the desperate glee and terror of being perched on the brink of understanding.

She felt almost guilty about it, because what was she even doing, wasting this much time on herself when there were other things she needed to do. 

But she needed it.

A lot of the information felt hopeless, far too clinical or just wrong to ever be right in applying to a person, somehow, even one who was different, and there was a lot of ways of phrasing in the books that stung at her in odd ways.

The newer books were better, sometimes, or the ones that seemed like they’d bothered listening to an autistic person before writing, or better yet, ones that were from autistic people, ones that talked about the difference between boys and girls, why sometimes you might not have noticed.

Internet, too, to take a break from the books. Articles, sure, but less concrete sources, too, but ones with a kind of validity to them that spoke of life experience and self-knowledge. Blog posts, journalings, forums, that kind of thing. Even a few questionnaires and quizzes, ones she'd gotten results on that felt indicative that she might be on the right track, even while she acknowledged they were just a tool.

Some of it felt like the fierce joy of learning about wizardry, the way that things in her world had slotted into place, new possibilities and perspectives and ways of seeing herself. Insecurities she’d always dismissed, strengths she’d never even thought about as such, because like Darryl had said, it was her normal, it just was. Weaknesses of hers, things she’d disliked without knowing why, reasons that things had been harder for her.

There had been one post that had hit her particularly, one about loss and grief, one that had put it all in a way that made more sense to her than all of the platitudes she’d had, lately, all the ways they’d tried to talk her through with coping. This had some other things to say, and part of her felt relieved, because sometimes she’d felt like the way she’d gone through things had been wrong, somehow, that she wasn’t supposed to process it the way she had.

Countless other things, bits and pieces that pulled itself into a picture that felt frighteningly right.

It terrified her, for reasons she couldn’t quite figure out, because why should it? It was something about herself, maybe, something that made her different, but she’d always known that, there just hadn’t been words for the differences, before.

But did it fit? Did it? What if it was something else? What if she was wrong? What if this wasn’t really an explanation, just a distraction and she’d just wasted a whole lot of effort.

Some of it made her angry, angry at the world for having withheld all of this from her, or the way people talked about people who… People who might be people like her, and angry for a bunch of other reasons, because it was easier, sometimes. 

And somehow, after wrestling with it for a week, after a few more Wellakh sessions and mumbled excuses, of wanting someone to talk to about it but not knowing who, and feeling like she was moving too slowly and too fast…

Somehow the next time Darryl and her met up, she’d stood on a spit of marsh in Jamaica Bay with the wind in her hair, and it had all come pouring of her. The questions, the doubt, the uncertainty, the certainty, all of it and both.

There were some clouds coming in, low and strong, with a darkness in them that hinted at rain. 

“Do you think I am?” She finished, desperately. 

Darryl picked up a piece of dry grass. “Maybe. But I’m not exactly the poster child for being good at knowing what’s in someone else’s head, you know? I can't tell you what you are. I don't think it works like that, not with this."

"Can't you? Doctors told you, didn't they, or they told your parents, anyway. Do I need to talk to a doctor about this?”

“If it helps, maybe. But a lot of psychiatrists I’ve talked to have been pretty rubbish at knowing much about autism, honestly. It’s no criticism on them as a field, but they don’t always get the training for it, or they’d got some pretty set ideas that don’t really bend. If you need it for school reasons, or something, maybe, but beyond that, I’m not sure how much it helps, sometimes. Do you think you are?” Darryl kept asking, and a bright part of her screamed yes! while the rest quavered.

I need to *know*, Dairine wanted to say. She always needed that surety, that knowledge of things, because once you knew something, it was safe, it was steady...

Or she'd thought that, for a long time. Recently? She was perhaps a little less sure.

Knowing didn't fix things, all the time, not really, or make it so, if something wasn't the fixing kind of thing, it was easier. She knew that. But it beat the alternative, the undefined state. She'd had enough of that, recently.

“Maybe. But… I just don’t know how this many years could have gone by without me noticing! I mean, I understand it, rates of diagnosis, difference in presentation, I’ve got all the data, I just.. I’m good at noticing things. And it feels weird that no one else knew, either. I wish someone had seen it, someone had told me.”

It struck her, suddenly, that her mother probably never knew, that she never would know, and the feeling of that made her stick for a minute, lost in that, before she pulled herself back out, because there were other people in her life would could still find out. If she was. If she told them. 

Ifs.

Darryl nodded, finally. “Well, sure. I don’t know if that means you’re lucky or not. On one hand, you’ve lived a lot of years without people treating you differently, because of it. But on the other… Well. People didn’t know that maybe sometimes they should have.” Darryl suggested, spinning the blade of grass. 

Dairine frowned. She wasn’t sure how she thought about that. Truth be told, she wasn’t sure how she thought about any of this. But at the same time…

“Thanks.” She said, eventually. 

“Anytime.” Darryl said. Something about the way he coached the offer made Dairine think she might be less likely to brush it off than she normally would have.

“I think I need…”

“Some time for being in your own head?” 

Dairine shrugged.

“We can finish the spell tomorrow, if you want. It can wait.” Darryl offered, gently, and Dairine tentatively looked at him, thought friend?, and wasn’t quite as afraid to think it.

“I can tell you’re not in the best shape for it, with everything on your mind.” Without any further ado, he just vanished, having stopped bilocating.

Dairine sat down, almost abruptly, Spot skittering beside her. 

The clouds were still coming in, and a bird wheeling above, the cry of another bird from somewhere behind her, as she pulled up her name in the Speech.

She sat there and looked, long and hard at her name, at every part of it. Just to be sure, because there was no going back from this, not really. Because once it was written, once it was said, it was a part of her, and she had to be sure about it. 

And maybe she was moving too quickly, maybe there was too much in too little time, or she was being influenced by everything that happened, lately, into a rush judgement on herself, and maybe….

But it felt right. 

So she sat down, looking over the delicate swirls of light, looked at everything she was.

And made… Well. Not a correction, exactly. That wasn’t right. Besides, it was tentative, because she could still be wrong, one that still allowed for leeway, for her to figure things out better, because she was still learning about it.

A…

Clarification, perhaps.


End file.
